Read Online The Shipping News by Annie Proulx - Free Book Online

the aunt spread it with a piece of broken wood for a knife, stirred the shivering eggs in the pan. The bread heel for the old dog. Bunny at the landwash casting peckled stones. As each struck, foaming lips closed over it.
    They sat beside the fire. The smoky stingo like an offering from some stone altar, the aunt thought, watched the smolder melt into the sky. Bunny and Sunshine leaned against Quoyle. Bunny ate a slice of bread rolled up, the jelly poised at the end like the eye of a toaster oven, watched the smoke gyre.
    â€œDad. Why does smoke twist around?”
    Quoyle tore circles of bread, put pinches of egg atop and said “Here comes a little yellow chicken to the ogre’s lair,” and made the morsels fly through the air and into Sunshine’s mouth. And the children were up and off again, around the house, leaping over the rusted cables that held it to the rock.
    â€œDad,” panted Bunny, clacking two stones together. “Isn’t Petal going to live with us any more?”
    Quoyle was stunned. He’d explained that Petal was gone, that she was asleep and could never wake up, choking back his own grief, reading aloud from a book the undertaker had supplied, A Child’s Introduction to Departure of a Loved One.
    â€œNo, Bunny. She’s gone to sleep. She’s in heaven. Remember,I told you?” For he had protected them from the funeral, had never said the word. Dead.
    â€œAnd she can’t get up again?”
    â€œNo. She’s sleeping forever and she can never get up.”
    â€œYou cried, Daddy. You put your head on the refrigerator and cried.”
    â€œYes,” said Quoyle.
    â€œBut I didn’t cry. I thought she would come back. She would let me wear her blue beads.”
    â€œNo. She can’t come back.” And Quoyle had given away the blue beads, all the heaps of chains and beads, the armfuls of jewel-colored clothes, the silly velvet cap sewed over with rhinestones, the yellow tights, the fake red fox coat, even the half-empty bottles of Trésor, to the Goodwill store.
    â€œIf I was asleep I would wake up,” said Bunny, walking away from him and around the house.

    She was alone back there, the stunted trees pressing at the foot of the rock. A smell of resin and salt. Behind the house a ledge. A freshet plunged into a hole. The color of the house on this side, away from the sun, was again the bad green. She looked up and the walls swelled out as though they were falling. Turned again and the tuckamore moved like legs under a blanket. There was a strange dog, white, somehow misshapen, with matted fur. The eyes gleamed like wet berries. It stood, staring at her. The black mouth gaped, the teeth seemed packed with stiff hair. Then it was gone like smoke.
    She shrieked, stood shrieking, and when Quoyle ran to her, she climbed up on him, bellowing to be saved. And though later he beat through the tuckamore with a stick for half an hour they saw no dog, nor sign. The aunt said in the old days when the mailman drove a team and men hauled firewood with dogs, everyone kept the brutes. Perhaps, she said doubtfully, some wild tribe had descended from those dogs. Warren snuffled without enthusiasm, refused to take a scent.
    â€œDon’t go wandering off by yourselves, now. Stay with us.”The aunt made a face at Quoyle that meant—what? That the child was nervy.
    She looked down the bay, scanned the shoreline, the fiords, thousand-foot cliffs over creamy water. The same birds still flew from them like signal flares, razored the air with their cries. Darkening horizon.
    The old place of the Quoyles, half ruined, isolated, the walls and doors of it pumiced by stony lives of dead generations. The aunt felt a hot pang. Nothing would drive them out a second time.

6
    Between Ships
    Oh make ‘er fast and stow yer gear,
    Leave ‘er, Johnny, leave ‘er!
    An tie ‘er up to the bloomin pier,
    It’s time for we to leave ‘er!
    OLD